In The Light of Destiny

The Exception

Kira heard her name from down the hallway before she heard the door. She had been in the bathroom washing her hands, taking a slow moment to herself in the quiet of the early evening the kind of quiet she had learned to hold onto carefully, because it never lasted long in a building full of women who were always either celebrating something or recovering from something. She dried her hands on the towel hanging from the rack and stepped out into the hallway just as Emma came bursting through the front door, her bag sliding from her shoulder, her cheeks flushed, her gray eyes brilliant with something that hadn't been there when she'd left this morning.

"I'm right here," Kira said, studying her friend's face with the careful attention she gave to everything. "What is going on? Are you alright?"

Emma stopped in the middle of the living room, pressed both hands to her chest, and made herself take one full breath before she spoke. She had clearly been running, or something close to it her hair was slightly undone at the ends, and she had the breathless, electric quality of someone who had sprinted the last block home because walking had felt physically impossible.

"I got a big part," she said. The words came out simply, directly, as if she still couldn't fully believe them and saying them plainly was the only way she could be certain they were real. "A big part, Kira. Today."

Kira felt the warmth move through her chest clean and genuine, without complication, at least for now. She smiled. "Emma, that's incredible. Tell me everything." She gestured toward the couch and sat down on the edge of it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, giving Emma her full attention the way she always did when it mattered.

Emma sat across from her, perching on the arm of the chair in the corner rather than settling into it, too animated to sit properly. She pushed her hair back from her face. "So Abutilon never called me back after I went to record the tape," she began, and the flicker of old frustration that crossed her face was brief but real the reminder that even this good story had a stretch of waiting woven through it. "Not a single word. I waited two weeks and nothing."

Kira nodded. She remembered. She remembered Emma checking her phone obsessively for three days, then pretending she wasn't checking it, then checking it again.

"So this morning I decided I wasn't going to wait anymore." Emma's chin lifted slightly. "I went down to the Brassica Agency building. Mr. Jonas's building."

Kira's eyebrows rose. "You went to Brassica?" She paused, recalibrating. "Mr. Jonas? Emma, he is the biggest producer working in this city right now."

"I know," Emma said, and there was something in the evenness of her tone that suggested she had known exactly what she was walking into and had gone anyway, which was the most Emma thing possible. "I wasn't going to get an appointment. I knew that. So I waited outside the building."

Kira stared at her. "You waited outside the building."

"I waited outside the building," Emma confirmed. "And when his car pulled up and he stepped out I stopped him."

The living room went very quiet. Outside, the usual noise of the side street continued a car passing, someone's music drifting from a window two floors up but inside, Kira felt the particular stillness that descended when a story arrived at its most important moment.

"You stopped Ledger Jonas," she said slowly, "on the street, in front of his own building."

"I did." Emma exhaled. "There were other people there too I counted at least four others waiting outside, same as me, same reason. All of us who couldn't get past the front desk, couldn't get an appointment, couldn't get a call back." She straightened slightly. "So when he stepped out of that car, I walked right up to him and I asked him how can you call yourself a producer if you never see any new actors or actresses?"

Kira's jaw came unhinged. She sat back against the couch cushion and simply stared, which was not an expression her face wore often. She was not easily astonished. She had lived a life that had burned through most of her capacity for shock. But this this had done it. "Emma," she breathed.

"I know," Emma said, a flash of the same disbelief visible in her own expression, as if part of her was still catching up to what the rest of her had done. "I told him all of us standing there are looking for a chance to prove that we are just as good. We just haven't had a chance to shine yet." She stopped to take a breath. "He looked at me. Then he looked at the others. Then he looked back at me."

"Then what happened?"

Emma's eyes shifted slightly, taking on the unfocused quality they got when she was reliving something rather than simply telling it.

The morning had been overcast, the kind of gray sky that felt indifferent rather than threatening, a sky that didn't particularly care what happened beneath it. Emma had arrived at the Brassica Agency building at eight-fifteen early enough to be there when he arrived, if the reports about his schedule were accurate, which she had verified by asking, very casually, at the coffee cart across the street where his assistant apparently bought his morning coffee every day.

She had stood to the side of the entrance, her portfolio under her arm, her good heels on despite the fact that she'd been standing on concrete for forty minutes. The other people were scattered around the entrance in the particular way of people who are trying not to look like they're waiting leaning against the wall, scrolling through phones, glancing up every time a car slowed on the street.

When the black car pulled up, something in the cluster of waiting people shifted a collective tightening, a shared intake of breath. Ledger Jonas stepped out of the back door. He was taller than she had imagined from photographs, broader through the shoulders, with the particular unhurried quality of a man whose time was too valuable for rushing.

Emma didn't think. She walked.

"Mr. Jonas." Her voice came out level and clear, and he stopped because a voice that certain was hard to walk past. He turned and looked at her. "How can you call yourself a producer if you never see any new actors or actresses?"

The people near the entrance went very still. His assistant, who had been half a step behind him, froze with his tablet raised.

Mr. Jonas looked at her for a long moment. His expression was unreadable not angry, not amused, something more complex than either. He looked, she thought, like a man who had not been spoken to this directly in some time.

"I told him," Emma continued, gesturing toward the others who had gathered closer now, drawn by the directness of the exchange, "that all of us are here looking for a chance to prove ourselves. We just haven't had anyone give us the opportunity. And his people the ones who are supposed to handle new recruits are never available. Always in meetings. Always at lunch. At ten-thirty in the morning."

Something shifted in his expression then. Something tightened.